Name: The Blue Stairs: Barbara Guest's Painterly Second Collection
Item: The Blue Stairs
Author: Vagobond

The Beat Century — post 29 of 100. Barbara Guest, The Blue Stairs (1968).

Published by Corinth in 1968 with a Frankenthaler cover, the second book by the only prominent woman of the first-generation New York School, built around a staircase in an Amsterdam museum.

The Modern Museum in Amsterdam has blue stairs. That flat note, attached to Barbara Guest’s title poem, is the whole of her method in one line: an actual object, precisely located, from which a poem departs without ever quite explaining itself. The Blue Stairs was published by Corinth Books in 1968, forty-eight pages in printed wrappers, with a cover by Helen Frankenthaler and a signed issue of a hundred numbered copies.

Guest was forty-eight when it appeared, and it was only her second full collection, following Poems: The Location of Things in 1962. That late and unhurried start is part of why she spent decades as the least-read member of a famous group. Her contemporaries had published early, loudly, and in quantity; she published carefully, and the poems asked more of a reader than the era’s appetite for personality was inclined to give.

The Poem That Withdraws the Stairs

The title poem opens by declaring that there is no fear in taking the first step, and it ends with a speaker who, having reached the summit, would like to remain there even if the stairs are withdrawn. Between those two propositions the poem conducts an argument about ascent, beauty and design that never resolves into a moral.

The closing image is the sharpest thing in the book. To want to stay at the top after the means of arrival has been removed is a description of achievement and of a trap at the same time, and Guest declines to say which she means. That refusal is not evasion. It is a poet trained by painting, where an image is permitted to hold two incompatible readings without a caption arriving to arbitrate.

The middle of the poem is worth slowing down over, because it shows the technique rather than the mood. Guest breaks into what reads like a museum label — “Now I shall tell you / why it is beautiful” — and then delivers the promised explanation as two nouns with colons after them: “Design: extraordinary / color: cobalt blue.” A poem that has just announced an aesthetic argument answers it in catalogue form, refusing the discursive sentence entirely. The line breaks do the rest. “To push / one foot ahead of the other” splits an idiom across the turn so the reader performs the stair-climb while reading it, and the next unit — “Being a composite / which sneers at marble” — pivots without transition to a snub aimed at classical statuary.

One later line is the closest the book comes to declaring a method: “Reading stairs / as interpolation / in the problem of gradualness.” The staircase is not a symbol but a syntax, a set of discrete increments inserted into what would otherwise be a continuous rise. Guest’s poems are built the same way — units placed at intervals, the gaps left in.

The Imprint and the Cover

Corinth Books is part of the argument the book makes. Ted and Eli Wilentz had opened the Eighth Street Book Shop in Greenwich Village in 1947 and started the press about a decade later, working in and out of partnership with LeRoi Jones’s Totem Press and Jonathan Williams’s Jargon. Corinth published Snyder’s Myths and Texts and O’Hara’s Second Avenue in 1960 and Ginsberg’s Empty Mirror in 1961, and later brought out Tom Weatherly, Al Young, Clarence Major and Jay Wright alongside Anne Waldman and Ted Berrigan before winding up in 1973. Guest’s book came from a house that was simultaneously the Beat imprint, the Black Arts imprint and the New York School imprint — a more accurate picture of how the period actually distributed itself than the school-by-school anthologies that followed.

The Frankenthaler cover is not decoration either. Frankenthaler had developed the soak-stain method in 1952 with Mountains and Sea, thinning oil paint with turpentine and letting it sink into unprimed canvas so the colour became part of the fabric rather than a layer on top of it — the technique Morris Louis called a bridge between Pollock and what was possible. Putting that painter on this particular jacket is a fair piece of criticism in itself. Guest’s poems work the same way: the material is absorbed rather than applied, and the ground shows through.

Words Placed Like Paint

Guest worked as an editorial associate at ARTnews from 1951 to 1959 and made collages during the same decade, some of which became book covers. Her daughter’s account of how she composed is the most useful description anyone has offered: her placement of words was like the placement of paint on a canvas.

This is not a metaphor about vividness. It describes a compositional procedure in which the position of a word on the page carries weight independent of its meaning, and in which the white space is active rather than empty. Guest later recalled a period when there was no recognised separation between the arts, and her poems assume that condition — spatial, saturated with colour, more concerned with arrangement than with statement.

A Touchstone Volume

The Blue Stairs functions as the hinge of her career, gathering the obsessions that the earlier work approached and the later work would pursue for another thirty-five years. Critics have described it as a Baedeker of those obsessions — a painterly attention to colour and spatial composition, a taste for sonic wordplay, and a habit of mixing the wild with the quotidian and the dreamlike with the all-too-real.

The characteristic effect is emotional without being nameable. Guest brings a reader to the edge of an unsettling feeling and then declines to identify it, which is why her poems resist paraphrase so completely and why they reward rereading better than they reward summary. Peter Gizzi’s observation that her poems begin in the midst of action, with perception arriving obliquely, describes the standard experience of opening one.

Her account of composition explains the difficulty from the other end. Guest held that the subject matter finds itself — that a poet discovers what a poem is about in the course of writing it rather than deciding beforehand. A book made on that principle cannot be read for its themes, because its themes were arrived at last. What can be read is the process, which is why the poems reward the attention one gives a painting: standing in front of it long enough for the arrangement to declare itself.

The One Woman in the Room

Guest belonged to the first generation of the New York School alongside Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery and James Schuyler, and she was the only woman among them to achieve comparable standing — a distinction that operated for most of her lifetime as a liability rather than a credential. The group’s public image formed around the male friendships, and the anthologies followed the image.

Her reputation recovered late and from an unexpected direction. Younger experimental poets, particularly those associated with Language writing, found in her abstraction and her spatial composition a precedent that the more conversational New York School poets did not supply. She was awarded the Frost Medal for lifetime achievement by the Poetry Society of America in 1999, at seventy-eight.

Where She Sits Beside the Beats

Guest is not a Beat and never claimed to be, and putting her in this company is an argument rather than a classification. The Beat project and the New York School project ran on the same coast-to-coast decade with opposite instincts: the Beats wanted the poem to be a transcript of a self at maximum intensity, and Guest wanted the poem to be a made object whose maker stays out of the way.

What she shares with them is the more fundamental commitment — that a poem answers to the other arts and to the moment of composition rather than to inherited literary decorum. She also shares the specific fate of the women in both circles: present from the start, indispensable to the people who were there, and left out of the story told afterwards.

The recovery of H.D. is the relevant precedent, and Guest performed it herself. Her 1984 biography Herself Defined did for an earlier woman modernist exactly what the last twenty years have been doing for Guest — establishing that the poet dismissed as peripheral to a male movement had in fact been central to its methods. She wrote more than fifteen books across sixty years and died at Berkeley on 15 February 2006, by which point the reassessment was well under way. The Blue Stairs is the book to start with, and its final image now reads as an unintended prophecy about her own standing.

And having reached the summit / would like to stay there / even if the stairs are withdrawn.

Barbara Guest, “The Blue Stairs”

Where to go next

Follow it with Guest’s Forces of Imagination: Writing on Writing for her own poetics, and with Helen Adam’s ballads for the other woman the period’s anthologies mislaid.

Previous: John Clellon Holmes, Go. Next: Lew Welch, Ring of Bone. One hundred books from the Beat Generation and the writers around them — the ones who got famous, the ones who got written out, and the ecological writing that grew out of the same soil. A new one every other day.

Sources

CD Damitio

CD Damitio writes at indignified.substack.com — essays on utopias, dystopias, and the spaces between. Free to read. No algorithm, no sponsored content. His books can be found on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/stores/CD-Damitio/author/B001JP7NWA

CD Damitio writes INDIGNIFIED — utopias and dystopias explored. Free to read.

Read on Substack → | Full catalog →